Everything you want to know about meditation and spiritual cultivation

foot chakra

December 24, 2008

As your Christmas gift, I’m going to tell you how to open up the chi channels in the foot, one of the most difficult tasks in spiritual cultivation. Most schools that say anything about this also mention how difficult it is.

You can open up the heart chakra through mantra and visualization on a point of focus behind the breastbone, just as I’ve outlined in the Vairocana-Zhunti tantra. You already have that method. It’s cultivating one-pointedness, or samadhi on a point which draws the chi to the point until it pops open. I’ve told you how to do this over and over. But for it to work, you need to loosen up ALL the chi channels ahead of time, and there is no better way than the full body skeleton cultivation method and breathing methods since they affect all channels at once. Plus mantra, of course. We cannot go into this.

You can help open up the throat region and throat chakra starting with the hints given by the Buddha Mahamati. It’s hard to open up this region because of all the glands in the surrounding area. At a later stage, one of Tathagata Vairocana’s techniques is to imagine the throat chakra as changing colors – red, blue, yellow, etc. – to help activate and pull out old chi channels from the region. But this is a stage when the channels you’re working on are extremely thin, and is far beyond the level of “no cut head” at the cultivation level of the skandhas. You need to know both methods if you’re going to do Vajrayana or form practices and want to proceed quickly. It’s not that other methods don’t work. It’s just that I’m trying to shave decades and possibly even aeons off your practice if you want to succeed quickly. You may not believe this but it’s because you just don’t know how kind I’m being.

After countless purifications of the five elements and further opening up the channels, you can arrive at the initialization of the River Chariot rotation, which is the “macrocosmic circulation” of Taoism. But the Tao school isn’t the only school that talks about this stage. Buddhism has it, the Esoteric school has it, tantric yoga has it, … and as I showed analyzing the “Song of Songs” from the Old Testament, even the Bible has it. It’s a non-denominational state of cultivation. You’ve got to get over this idea “my tradition is best” or “mine is so high” or “only this school has this ” because frankly it’s all nonsense. These are all the non-denominational stages of physical gong-fu I’m talking about, It’s all science. I’m being kind to link these schools and the stages for you so you’re no longer confused. All the religions can access the four dhyana, and these are the physical states of gong-fu on the way to the dhyana. The dhyana are common achievements but as for the wisdom achievements that get you the Tao, that’s another story for another day. Only Buddhism, Zen and Vedanta approach it with very clear teachings. What differentiates Buddhism fromt he rest of the spiritual schools is prajna wisdom, and perhaps one day we can get to it and Zen.

Now opening up the feet chakras and chi channels is particularly difficult. One of the respectful names for a Buddha, or fully enlightened one, refers to the fact he has opened up the chakras and chi channels in the bottom of the foot. To be given a name just for this feat alone should tell you it’s extremely difficult, so I’m giving you a big heads up. You won’t find this information elsewhere, not anywhere. It’s due to the kindness of Ksitigarbha Buddha that we have it, so I pass it on to you. How can you pay him back? You cannot since he’s helping you cut off several aeons of cultivation effort. If you think you can just go buy this information in a bookstore, your head is in the clouds. It’s only out of kindness and mercy that’s it’s provided. Such good fortune must be paid for – Buddhas don’t even teach this publicly or privately because the cost is so high, so you usually have to figure it out from their hints. That’s how difficult this is and how important and valuable it is. You cannot succeed without merit.

But before I tell you the technique, we must remember that Taoism says you must breath from the bottom of your feet. Some Tao school books specifically mention your heels. Both are correct, and other cultivation schools say similar things. Why do they all say this? Because the stage is non-denominational.

These schools are referring to the fact that when you open the large macrocosmic River chariot rotation of the tu-mai, jen-mai, sushumna and feet channels, etc. you open up the channels enough so that you can find a pump in the heels of the foot that help push the chi back upwards after it descends from the root chakra perineum to the toes.

Remember that at the initial stages of cultivation (where you’re probably at), when you have extra energy you try to run it lightly down the insides of the legs to the toes to open that channel, and when weak you lightly draw it upwards through those acupuncture meridians. This stage is so far beyond that but for a lucky person who works hard to get to the River Chariot Rotation these following instructions are worth more than gold. When those inner leg channels open, you usually will have sinus problems for awhile. But remember again that there’s “open” and then there’s “OPEN” — there are many stages to the “opening” process because the large diameter chi channels are filled with many diameters of smaller chi channels made of more subtle chi which you cannot yet see. You “open” the gross level first before you can find and then “OPEN” the finer levels. So what I’m going to tell you is several stages past the River Chariot rotation, and most Taoist “successes” never find this…

In Buddhism this is all summarized by the phrase “purifying the five elements” so you can get a glimpse of how high Buddhist cultivation is when you realize it doesn’t focus on this stuff because it’s all low level. It’s still just cultivating form rather than prajna, so in one respect you can say this is inocrrect or not the right road. But if you say you are transforming the Reward body, you’re a bit on track BUT ONLY if you understand the wisdom way and have read a lot of wisdom sutras (the Diamond Sutra, Vimalakirit Sutra, Lotus Sutra, …) so your view is correct. If your view is correct then you can eat a bit of poison, but if it isn’t correct you will die along this route and achieve nothing.

Once you get to the River Chariot rotation, how do you proceed further? Breathing practices — in particular anapana. I gave you an entire teaching on this in the “Anapanasati” sutra article. Read it again. Even Confucianism reaches this stage of achievement because Mencius talked about it, which I showed. Why? To you it’s high, but it’s form cultivation so it’s low. In the absolute sense this is garbage, and yet this is the gong-fu foundational basis for stable attainment. Don’t attach. Treat it in the right manner…

Anapana is one of the top methods of the Zen school at this stage for increasing your gong-fu. That’s a big secret no one will tell you – you owe Master Nan Huai-Chin for that pointer. The Zens chool uses anapan even after the great breakthrough. You sit and fill yourself with chi, letting go and observing the process. Let it fill everywhere — there are no barriers in the body and no boundaries to the body — the body has no barriers but is just chi, so it has no boundaries. You are not the body anyway. This is cardinal principle number one in Buddhism, but now you’re getting there where you can stay in that realization for long periods of time. Congratulations. Anyway, anapana is how to you cultivate.

People who continually cultivate anapana can achieve rainbow bodies at death, or their bodies will slowly shrink to nothingness over a week as they die. You already have the method. Another thing they can do is predict the date and time of their death because of their breathing practice. Both these phenomena have been seen by many people in many schools, so there is no reason to go into them.

There’s yet another way besides anapana, and here’s the secret. You need a lot of blessings to be able to do this tantric means and it will use up a lot of energy and concentration as well, but is extremely quick.

You first start focusing on the large squarish heel pumps, which look like they’re cubes in shape. Are they really cubes? Not really, but that’s the general appearance when you start. Later you’ll see what they are after they disintegrate or shrink or transform, however you want to word it.

Just as the root chakra furnace looks squarish, and the furnaces beneath the other chakras look like little cubes, soon you find out why. The heel pump at the level of the macrocosmic circulation, or River Chariot rotation, appears cubish itself. So what you do is first THINK.

Cultivation always requires clear thought, wisdom principles and logic. It’s science all the way through, nothing mysterious or mystical or supernatural. But of course you need merit to succeed. Merit is something you might deem mystical but that’s because you cannot yet fathom the workings of interdependent origination. That’s why I wrote “White Fat Cow” for changing your fortune and destiny, but most people still don’t get it.

Thinking as to what to do, you realize you usually push the impure chi out the toes, or the center of the foot chakras. So in this case, it makes sense for you to focus on the bottom of the heel pump cubes and try to push out any junk from within them. The junk includes levels of impure chi and thinner and thinner chi channel networks and bundles that are embedded in layers of each other. Unless you get there you won’t understand. At the gross level it just looks like a chi flame when junk is exuding but at higher and higher stages of cultivation you can see micro thin chi channels bundled together and layered within each other or connected in a small network. But we won’t go into this. All I can say is that to get to the ultimate layer you’re always purifying these coarser layers.

So how do you open the heel chakra pumps? You can imagine a white circle in the center of the cube, and then try to push out the chi which is similar to methods you may have used to get to this stage if you used tantric yoga or Vajrayana, Yogacara methods. These are all form school methods as are most of the methods in Judaism, Taoism, Bon, western alchemy, nei-gong, etc. You imagine a white circle (the protruding top of the old impure chi) and imagine a shining silver ball or sphere about an inch or so in front of the opening, and thereby pull it out using that bright source of yang.

Yang attracts yin – it’s a universal principle of science – so you should understand this method of pulling out impure (yin) chi by attraction. You imagine a bright, silvery flame, circle, Buddha, whatever … in front of chi channel opening and the yin chi will be attracted to it and try to squeeze out the channel, at which point it’s on it’s way out. In this case you imagine a silvery globe, flower, ball or whatever beneath the foot underneath the heel pump center to attract out the impure chi. You might imagine a flame exuding out the bottom of the cube to get it started as well. Those are all similar techniques based on the same principles. It’s science from beginning to end, but you need instructions for how to do it. THINK carefully and you can create your own.

Okay, if you do that with enough concentration the heel chakra pump will eventually empty out and open up. Guess what happens next? The SURPRISING thing is that it will actually get smaller in size as you pull out more and more layers (diameters or tubes) of chi. When you pull out enough of them (and this takes hours at this stage of practice– this is certainly nothing a beginner can accomplish), the cube will shrink in size until it becomes a small cubic nugget. How much will it shrink? Big surprise! Until it’s a tiny cube!

We’re talking about an inch becoming less than a quarter or eighth of an inch or smaller. This is what’s hidden within the foot pump but you never knew it. It’s not so much it shrinks but that the untransformed inner layers are revealed after you transform or purify the outer layers by eliminating the old garbage impure chi at the nexus points. That’s the process of tantric yoga. The old coverings drop away and the inner layers revealed, but at this stage all the flesh is gone and only the sparse network remains.

“But wait, there’s more….”

If you reach that stage, then on the left and right sides of the foot small cubes will then similarly suddenly appear. Surprise! They are hidden until you purify out the chi to this level and get rid of it by pulling it out the foot heel chakra. Then this new level of superstructure underneath can appear … it’s the superstructure left and who knows what’s beneath this level once you purify it? You’ll have to go even further beyond this level of transformation to find out. I can only take you so far.

If you can empty these little cubes (connected by thin channels the width of extremely thin wires) out, then more and more will appear making up the infrastructure net of the foot. One after another they appear as others are transformed – they don’t all appear at once because you haven’t purifed enough chi for this to happen. A netowrk of channels has to be pulled out for the connected cubes to become visible.

This is surprising. It’s a stage well beyond the appearance of the foot channel, but still very rudimentary or coarse. Now you have to open up all these tiny cubes (which just look like cubes but aren’t). How do you do that?

First the procession, then the method.

You work on the heel, then on other new cubes that appear on the inside of the foot and on the outside. They’ll slowly appear as more and more of them are purified. They do not all appear at once. As you purify one, then another and then another appears to slowly reveal the hidden infrastructure. You do both sides of the foot (several will appear) and then the ones in the center of the foot in the center of those chakras will finally appear last. That’s the progression. They’re hidden until you reach this stage of refinement. It takes houirs to work on them and once started don’t stop for fear you’ll lose this stage and have to do too much preparatory work again to reclaim it.

Now the method. The idea of creating a flame out of the cubes to pull out the old impure channels works, but not too well. It’s exhausting. The idea of squeezing them out that you may have used previously is exhausting, too. The idea of leading them out using silvery yang globes is also exhausting and verrrrrrry slow at this sper refined stage. All these forceful methods are exhausting and slow and not as reliable as the following quick technique.

One method works best. Pay attention! This is the method of the Buddha Ksitigarbha I’m teaching you, an enlightened being who has devoted himself to purifying all the hells. Ksitigarbha, I bow to you and salute you because none of us are as great as you. Ksitigarbha Buddha has vowed, “If hell is not yet empty, I vow not to become a Buddha” and you can find his story in the “Sutra of the Past Vows of Earth Store Bodhisattva” available on amazon.com.

All of us want to go to the Heavens, and none of us want to go to the Hells to help the beings there. But if we don’t open up our foot chi channels, we haven’t gotten rid any large chunk of our own Hell karma. That’s one reason you sit with cross legs, which is to try to open up the chi channels in the legs, and the pain you bear helps burn up bad karma as well as force the channels to open. Two birds with one stone, but ordinary people don’t realize the deep wisdom behind all these things. I’m spilling the beans and all the secrets so you can get a small glimpse and comprehend. I really dislike talking about gong-fu but no one will listen to wsidom teachings or wisdom sutras. Everyone thinks they are beyond that and understands. I just laugh….

On the site I’ve also taught you how to make nightly offerings to the hungry ghosts for some merit, and if you want to succeed at opening the feet you must perform this nightly two minute offering and recite sutras or mantras for ghosts and hell beings. Frankly you need merit. You hate to hear it but if you already had enough merit you would have already succeeded.

But on to the method …

Which portion of the human body corresponds to the hells? As you know from “Tao and Longevity,” from the navel downwards corresponds to the Desire Realm. Ghosts are rarely seen having feet because they cannot open up the foot channels. Devils are seen with cloven feet to remind us that the feet are dead or yin for those who are evil and do not cultivate virtue. The bottom of the foot is the most extreme yin place of the body, corresponding to the hells. If you can open up the feet, not only can you become a Taoist Immortal who lives a long life, but most of all save the hell beings in your own body. Some people who achieve this can learn how to fly like Milarepa or the Taoist Immortal Lu.

What is the Buddha Ksitigarbha’s method for opening up these cubes that are interconnected by wire thin channels dotting the superstructure of the foot? Ksitigarbha Tathagata, who always appears as monk, carries a staff. Imagine the impact of a metal staff hitting the ground: bang, bang, bang. With each jolt, the tiny chi channels within the centers of the cube will tap a bit out, and it you keep jostling them this way with the taps, you will be able to push out yet a thinner/tinier degree of chi channels and empty out these nexus points. So you imagine the tapping of the staff on the ground, while focusing on the cubes, and with each tap the center junk can jostle out a bit.

That’s the basic method and it works far, far better than anything else you can create, even twirling the chi and so forth. At the minimum you owe quite a few bows to Ksitigarbha just for hearing about this, let alone practicing it. And recite the Diamond Sutra for the ghosts with a offering tonight because it will help them.

What’s next? If you so that for the entire foot, which takes hours and hours, eventually the entire body drops away except for this superstructure of squares and channels that has been there all along hidden. This superstructure or net surrounds the chi of flesh. It’s very “sparse” in that the nexus cubes are very far apart in most places. Amazing that this is revealed. You can find the wire net structure of chi channels and cubic intersections that forms the outer structure of the human body. I’m not going to explain more. You’ll have to keep cultivating to find the next stage beyond this, too.

Congratulations. You’ve just realized a stage far beyond what you normally read about in Taoism or in the Esoteric School. Tibetan monks don’t have anything on you because they don’t have these teachings. They achieve the stage, like evryone else, but there are no teachings on this. Neither do the Jewish, Christians, Moslems, Sikhs, Mormons, Pagans, Western Alchemists, and so forth have any such gong-fu teachings. If you can get there and use this you owe 10,000 prostrations to Ksitigarbha Tathagata who doesn’t care about your prostrations or kow-tows, but knows that if you want help for success at this stage then you need both merit and a karmic connection. Many enlightened masters of the past would go around asking people for a single coin in order to establish a karmic connection for the future. Maitreya, as the Venerable Master Budai, is just one of the many masters who used to do this. Master Budai’s eulogy read:

“Just as this cloth sack confuses many men,
He begs from whomever he meets. Whatever for?
Whenever he meets a test, there’s nothing you can do.
Don’t miss the chance; he is the future Buddha!”

Oh yes, I forgot to say this is a good time to try to cultivate and succeed in the fire samadhi for your entire body. And that when you are using the White Skeleton meditation (visualization) method to transform your foot bones (starting with your big left toe), you can rotate the chi this way and that in the foot, especially from within and around the bones, and use Ksitigarbha’s mantra “Om Pra Ma Ni Da Ni Soha.” This will go a long way to helping transform them and prepare for the higher stages of the path, plus other marvelous untold benefits.

Tantric cultivation like this is just a process, but don’t think it’s so easy. Without merit you absolutely cannot succeed. Without instructions you cannot succeed either. You can read all you want and practice, practice, practice but you cannot succeed without enough cultivation merit. Even with merit and instructions, without a good teacher you cannot succeed. Without the help of other enlightened beings you cannot succeed either, which is why I always tell you to establish a karmic connection. But at least I’ve told you more than you’ll ever find anywhere else. Don’t say I’m not merciful. Good luck.

When you open up the heart chakra and pass through the conception skandha, just as Buddha said the enlightened beings will come and anoint your forehead. But if you can crack open these little nexus points, many more Buddhas will gather round in excitement to watch because it is so hard to do this and so rare to have someone find them. It’s big excitement on their side if someone can reach this stage of transforming the physical body. It’s just body transformation, not enlightenment.

I try to be kind, so here are some methods you should remember:

Sometimes you use the method of Ksitigarbha’s staff banging the ground to jostle the dirty chi channels out of them. Other times you can image the sound of a metal hammer striking an anvil, and use the sound to jostle them out. One Buddha taught that you can use a long feather to tickle them out rather than use force, in which case you try to go to their root source and tickle that so it lets go and they loosen from their connection point within the larger framework.

Zhunti Buddha teaches that sometimes you can rotate and spin the channels inside, to twirl the garbage channels within the larger tubes. What you do is grab one of the innermost nexus points and keep twisting it, and then enlargen its parent diameter to pull it out along with the chi channels connected with it. Or you can grab an inner nexus point and slooooowly pull it while rotating it in a wide circle of the width of the chakra (while pulling it at a 45 degree angle to the surface of the chakra) until all the useless channels it’s connected to are pulled off and fall down; the weight will cause them to open up the other nets so that all the garbage falls through. Zhunti is extremely smart and wise. I bow to you, Zhunti Tathagata, and pass on your technique.

Remember that with your mind you can expand the diameter of the ends of the channels, but if you reach a channel whose mouth you cannot open that way with your mind (because the nexus point is too tight), you’ve reached the level you should grab and pull out. What a big secret I’ve revealed that will save you how much TIME and ENERGY and EFFORT at this stage. The advice is invaluable … I’m sorry I but I have to say it. For instance, the Tibet school always says you should cultivate the bright points and bindus, but they never tell you how. Surprise! Now you know many ways to do it.

It’s so hard to empty out the channels (Shakyamuni Buddha just called it purifying the four elements) so you have to use many different methods because the old methods of generating bright points at chi channel openings to attract out the dirty chi doesn’t work well at this stage. So at other times you grab the nexus points from their centers and keep pulling out the long strings of garbage chi channels and the garbage chi and connected chi channel network connected with them. Within each nexus point there is another and another and another and so on made of thinner and thinner and thinner chi channels. They only become revealed when you somewhat empty out the larger diameter. The more you empty out, the more nexus points are revealed.

Each level you go through purifies another layer of chi. The smaller the center you can grab, the more you can pull out. For instance, when you see a bit of white chi protrude from the channel, you can use your mind (mind and chi are linked) to enlargen that chi channel’s opening, go into the white paste chi and grab any tiny nexus point deep within in and then use it to pull out the garbage using that anchor point. So in other words, you’re going one level thinner/tinier and pulling it out the larger diameter which you make wider through the efforts of mind.

I suggest you first work on the foot — all the foot chakras, and then you can eventually get to the crown chakra, throat chakra and heart chakra points which won’t appear until you’ve done a lot of work to pull out the old gross channel widths. It is incredibly difficult to find these little points and extremely difficult to cultivate them.

If you can do this and eventually get to the level of finding twisted chi channels, and reach the stage of the “powdered” charcoal chi coming out (which is akin to the stage of Blackness when you pass through the conception skandha when first opening the heart chakra), and go past the stage of flourescent blue, then you have really done something and made some progress. Usually it takes a few aeons to cultivate the chi channels this thin and clear them out. What first seems like a cube is eventually clarified to reveal a polygonal shaped nexus pulled by chi channels at its corners (it’s hard to see which shape it actually is because they’re so small), within which the center is a empty circle and within that empty center, attached to the corners through wire thin chi channels connected to its parent outsider is yet another polygonal shape, and so on and so on. Tinier and tiner they get. You’ll have to cultivate yourself to find out what the actual shape is for yourself.

The width (thinness) of the chi channels at these stages is so very thin so even calling them wires brings up too large a connotation of imagery. Every time you empty out one larger layer by pulling out all the garbage within its diameter, newer thinner layers appear that were previously hidden by all the gook. Guess what? You have to purify all of them to attain a Reward body (sambhogakaya) and transform your karmic inheritance. Vow to become a Buddha, a fully enlightened being, and do this.

If you don’t read these sutras and practice prajna wisdom, there’s no way you can succeed just by doing yoga. Reading Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta will help a lot, as will Three Texts on Consciousness Only (Numata Institute) and The Awakening of Faith (Avagosha).

I used to argue with my teacher - formally recognized as an “enlightened” Esoteric school master by the Hutuku – that Tibetan Buddhism teachings were so high and he used to tell me they were the low stuff. But he was right, he was right yet people don’t believe it because they don’t have enough gong-fu and wisdom to know. What I’m teaching you is far beyond what they normally teach gong-fu wise and yet it is still all very low level. So good luck and remember the process….and if you want it in a subsequent life then spread it around. That’s your job to disseminate useful cultivation methods widely if you want the dharma in the future.